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Museums & Galleries in Georgetown
Guyana's capital on the Atlantic coast, a low wooden city laid out by the Dutch behind a sea wall and a lattice of drainage canals. Its colonial architecture, from St George's Cathedral to the cast-iron Stabroek Market, frames a cluster of national museums that tell the country's Amerindian, colonial and artistic story.
Why here
Georgetown is the key to understanding Guyana before you head into the forest, and its museums do it well. The Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology, the oldest of its kind in the English-speaking Caribbean, holds the material culture of the country's nine indigenous nations: pottery, weaving, hunting and fishing gear and archaeological finds from the interior you are about to visit. Castellani House, a wooden 1879 landmark, is now the National Gallery of Art and keeps the largest public collection of Guyanese art, including the modernist Aubrey Williams. The Guyana National Museum adds natural history, gold and colonial industry. Around them stands one of the great wooden cities of the tropics: St George's Cathedral, among the tallest wooden churches on earth, the red Stabroek Market with its four-faced clock, City Hall and the sea wall. Walked with a local guide, the museums and the streets together read as one lesson in how nine peoples, three empires and a rainforest made this country.
Best months
The museums are open year round and the visit is largely indoors, so any season works; the drier months, February to April and September to November, are the most comfortable for walking the streets between them. Georgetown is hot and humid, and afternoon downpours are common in the wet season. Opening hours can be short and change without much notice, and some galleries close at weekends, so confirm times locally and start early. The city rewards care after dark; a guided daytime walk is the easy, rewarding way to link the sites.
Getting there & around
The museums sit within a compact central grid, walkable or a short taxi ride apart around Main Street, Company Path and Vlissengen Road. Georgetown is the arrival point for almost every Guyana trip, with the international airport at Timehri about an hour south, so the museums fold naturally into the start or end of an itinerary. Entry fees are small. A local heritage-walk operator is the simplest way to combine the collections with the cathedral, market and sea wall in a half day.
Skill levels: beginner
Schools & guides (3)
Castellani House National Gallery of Art
OrganizerCastellani House holds Guyana's National Gallery of Art, a landmark wooden building on Vlissengen Road designed by the Italian priest and architect Cesar Castellani and completed in 1879. Once the state botanist's residence and later a prime minister's home, it has been the national art gallery since 1993 and keeps more than 700 works, the largest public collection of Guyanese art, including the modernist painter Aubrey Williams and the sculptor Philip Moore.
Nature Travel GY
GuideNature Travel GY is a Guyanese operator based at Mon Repos on the East Coast Demerara that runs guided heritage walks through Georgetown, the wooden capital laid out behind Dutch drainage canals. Its city tour takes in St George's Cathedral, one of the tallest wooden churches in the world, the cast-iron Stabroek Market under its four-faced clock, the National Museum and the Walter Roth Museum, and the sea wall where West Indian manatees are fed. Guides are local and certified.
Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology
OrganizerThe Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology is the oldest anthropology museum in the English-speaking Caribbean, established in 1974 and opened to the public in 1982 in a wooden colonial house at 61 Main Street, Georgetown. It is named for Walter Edmund Roth, the magistrate and ethnographer who documented Guyana's Amerindian peoples, and its collection covers the country's nine indigenous nations: pottery, cotton weaving, basketry, hunting and fishing tools and archaeological finds from the interior.